Goodbye social life, hello football (FIFA 2006 (PS2))

Member Name: JEStevens

Product:	FIFA 2006 (PS2)
Date:	18/05/06 (165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good playability, excellent graphics

Disadvantages: Addicitivness

Fifa ‘06

Oh yes here it is ladies and gentlemen, coinciding with the start of my university year – the new FIFA 2006!!

Called a national institution for over a decade by Amazon.co.uk this game is as important to British life as pie and chips… or so they’d have you believe.


- Introduction –
For those who don’t know, this is a football game for the PS2. It is a one-two player game through many leagues such as Premiership, Championship, La Liga, Budesliga etc as well as a large number of International teams – you can play out every Englishman’s fantasy and win the world cup!
When playing the game you control the players, you have to make the tackles, passes, crosses and shooting etc
On top of actually playing the game you can manage a team for 15 years, do various tournaments etc – in this you have to mange sponsorship, morale, formation and other tactical bits and bobs.


- Game play -
I found this version of Fifa a significant improvement on previous versions, the actual playability of the game is quite high – I always take the stance that unless you actually enjoy playing a game it doesn’t matter how realistic or ‘pretty’ it is. The difficulty of the game varies from player to play – i.e. I batter my dad but get beat by my 8 year old cousin. The controls of the game are pretty much the same as previous versions plus a few new moves (note you actually have to be good to pull most of them off).

There are several game modes:
Quickplay – basically here you can play a quick 1 or 2 player game.

Manager Mode – this is a vast 15 season campaign where you get to alter every aspect of your game, from new signings, sponsorship etc etc – I could go on for days here. Throughout your career your manager rating goes up or down – for example you could start managing Doncaster and end up getting AC Milan.

Fifa Lounge – here you can have upto 8 friends in basically a custom league, as with all leagues the better you do the higher up the table. This is one of my favourite parts of Fifa as there’s nothing better than having a league table that says you are the best.

Online play – I’d have thought this was self explanatory – haven’t played on this mode yet so cannot comment on it.

- Authenticity/ Graphics -
The graphics on this game are really rather good, as expected an improvement on previous versions, authenticity is excellent as well as has 21 leagues and more than 10 000 world class players with some of the latest team selections etc. along with this there is a selection of clips from the previews of the premier league, Italian league etc.

The value for money of this game is superb from my point of view, currently retailing at £29.99 in Amazon I’ve had a huge amount of gameplay out of this. However it does have a side effect – I’ve noticed a disturbing lack of progress work wise due to me playing on this.

Summary: what can i say?